How Long Has This Been Going On (78 page)

"Blue's at the hospice," said the current boy friend. "Who's this?"

"It's Walt Uhlisson."

After a moment: "Oh. Right. So you're the one."

"I can call back when—"

"No, I'll take your number. I'll tell him you called."

Hanging up, Walt thought, Boy, he sounded funny.

Funny, yes—but the current boy friend was no fool. He knew who Walt was—for who of us does not plague our latest with encomiums to his or her most distinguished predecessor? When Blue got home, the guy said, "I've asked the phone company to change our number. Too many of your old tricks are hassling us."

"Guess so," said Blue.

"I'm glad you're back, anyway. I've been hot for you all day. Let's hit the sack, huh?"

"Got this piece to read first," said Blue, pulling a homemade newsletter out of the run-down attache he had bought for fifteen bucks on Sacramento one afternoon, from a guy in a hurry. Blue was in need of a briefcase, because there was so much that he had to carry around now. Articles, records, notes he had taken. There was so much news. Just as many P.W.A.s had grouped to test uncertain drugs on themselves, free of the obstructive meddling of government agencies, so had many afflicted gay men begun publishing their own AIDS magazines, reporting news that the city papers ignored and emphasizing anecdotal treatments adopted by others in their circle. In his brief but heady experience caring for P.W.A.s, Blue discovered that the ailing were best stimulated by reports of novel treatments. It was the
Star Wars
approach to AIDS care: if not doomsday, then flags, gold, majesty.

"You'd rather read than fuck, is that it?" asked Blue's current boy friend, a glorious gym bunny with a single flaw, a slightly Hogarthian nose.

Blue looked at him, thinking, What am I here for?

"Are you just a visual?" Blue's current boy friend went on. "All right, you're paying your share of the rent and so on, but your name isn't on the lease. I wanted a lover, not a roommate. We haven't scored since I don't know
fuck that,
Mister Health-Care Worker of the Year!
Will
you?
Huh?"

Blue moved out the next day, and, the day after, Walt called.

"The number's going to change this afternoon," said Blue's current ex-boy friend, "so you can stop annoying me."

"I just want to—"

"He's gone. Permanently."

"Well, can you tell me—"

"Go fuck yourself," said the guy, holstering the receiver.

Tom died in late 1988, directly after coming home from the hospital and suffering a relapse of another of those bizarre diseases unknown to humans till now. Bird cancer. Monkey dropsy. These insanely
asinine
deaths. Walt returned to San Francisco for Tom's funeral, a discontented but quiet Walt, who stood between Chris and Luke holding their hands, watching the long box drop as if he were now one third an orphan.

Luke, paradoxically, seemed in robust health. He refused to be tested, partly for the usual reason—If I'm to die, tell me later—and partly out of distrust of the political meaning of such a test and a misgiving at how intensely the medical establishment embraced the H.I.V. cult, furiously rejecting opposing theories without probation.

"It isn't science to ignore alternative explanations without testing them," Luke told anyone who asked. "It's flat-earth geology."

Chris was around a lot; she even brought David J. Henderson over to watch Luke prepare Ten Thousand Lakes stuffed cabbage and wild rice, and J. got so engaged in the cuisine shoptalk that Luke said J. would make a passable gay guy.

"Another Stone Age stereotype," said Walt, who had dug Claude up and was giving him a bath in the kitchen sink. "I'm gay and I can't cook. I never even saw a quiche."

"For all that," said Chris, "I can't cook, and I'm a gay man manqué."

"That's where the manqué comes in," said Luke, clarifying the gravy.

Walt had planned to spend his free hours tracking Blue—but this time there was no great hunt, no trail to piece together. Blue was no longer one of the urban gay world's more or less anonymous beauties, to be spotted on the street, made legend in the discos. He had become prominent, a real person with a name and an occupation. Indeed, he worked for a California-based association that sent him nationwide from city to city, organizing gay hospices.

Walt couldn't believe it; he kept insisting that those he spoke to were confusing Blue with someone else. But too many unconnected sources verified the story. Walt marveled and pondered and left his name and phone number at the switchboard of Blue's firm, though the person who took it warned that Mr. Gadsden gets so many messages that he doesn't even try to keep up with them.

"He used to, you see. But so many of them were from relatives of people who died, always wanting to know more about it, you see. But who
does
know about it? Do you? Do I?"

"This is a personal message from an old friend of his," said Walt.

"Except our Mr. Gadsden is kind of like that river in the folk song—just keeps rolling along, you see. You might try a letter, though we can't seem to forward the mail fast enough. It's as if he didn't
want
to hear from anyone, see what I mean?"

"Thank you," said Walt. "I won't try any more."

Not long after Walt had returned to New York, Chris went out for a "thinking walk," a long, distracted hike during which she would run over her choices and try to remember not to move her lips when she rehearsed what she'd say to the various major characters in her life. Often, she would stop on the way for rest and refreshment; while sitting in Kaffee Klatsch, nursing an omelet and mint tea, she noticed a tense and rather attractive young woman staring at her from the next table.

"So you're the director," said the stranger.

Chris waited.

"Of that play. The soap opera?"

Chris slightly nodded.

"I lost my lover in your theatre. Alice Chen?"

"Oh. Oh, I see. Ah. Yes. Well, I think I'm losing my lover in my theatre, too," said Chris. "Unless I lose my theatre and absolutely surrender to my lover."

"Huh."

"'If the sparrow flies, the hawk goes hungry.'"

"What's
that
the fuck?"

"A Swedish proverb. It sort of means that for everyone who gets something, someone else loses something. You could call it the arch-individualistic view of life. As opposed to the tribal or communistic."

The stranger thought this over, then picked up her grilled cheese deluxe and coffee and plonked herself down at Chris's table.

"Evan," she said.

"Chris."

"Terribly curious.
I mean, your lover and so on."

Chris shrugged. "I've been trying to figure it out all day. J. wants a home-kind of wife—"

"Me, too."

Chris smiled. "Alice Chen was your—"

"She still is, except now we have one of those open relationships of the ultramodern lesbianic code, which says, Thou shalt not control thy girl friend's cunt." Evan took a bite of her sandwich. "Too much like het marriages, apparently."

"Alice seemed so demure, though. Anything but a couch artist, I would have thought."

"Lady, that's her
act.
She's a manipulative little bitch with a gate of stone. Some love and leave 'em, am I right? I am right. Alice collects 'em. Keeps us on a string, wet and panting."

"I should sign up for lessons."

"So what's a smart dame like you doing with one of these man-is-the-center-of-the-universe punks?"

"Oh, but there's the rub—he's incredibly thoughtful and generous. He's ideal."

"Do you want your fiber?"

"My..."

"The sprouts. Looks like you're skipping them."

Chris offered her plate and Even claimed the sprouts. "Go on," Evan urged. "Thoughtful, ideal..."

"Intellectually invigorating..."

"And built like a Percheron?"

Chris blushed. "You saw the show. He played the visiting English lord."

"Oh, lady. Those dreamboat straight men are death on a woman, you don't know that? They take what they want—just like my Alice."

"Except he's right, in a way. Showbiz marriages don't work unless the partners are always together, like the Lunts or Julie Andrews and Blake—"

"So how come
you
give up
your—"

"Yet why should
he
give up for me? It's a stalemate."

"If he loved you, he wouldn't give you up!"

"He says we'd tear each other to shreds."

"Isn't that the fun part?"

"Not for me," said Chris.

"Fascinated." Evan polished off her sandwich, pointed at the last of Chris's omelet, and, at Chris's nod, scooped it onto her plate. "Hate wasting food," Evan explained. "So now what?"

"I give in or he walks."

"The toad."

"Well, he did offer a compromise—I can take off once every year for a single project."

"Pretty shitty."

"Except..." Chris began, then stopped.

"Come on, you can tell me."

"Well, I haven't really made it in a big way, have I? I'm not sure how important the theatre is to me now. It was more exciting when I was young and nobody was dying."

"That hasn't stopped Alice, I assure you."

"She's a wonderful actress, actually."

"Defter than you know."

"So what's
your
choice? Give her up, or—"

"Oh, I can't give Alice up, and I can't match her. I'm her slave and I hate it. She's breaking all the rules."

Chris smiled. "I always thought gay life didn't have rules."

"We don't have standard rules—we each make our own. And Alice... She just isn't
combining,
you know?"

"She seemed very close to Fay."

"Another slave. Good sex makes us all so demented!"

"My problem isn't sex," said Chris, deeply pensive, as if just figuring something out. "It's love. I want to go home. You know? I want a place that
is
home. With people waiting for me there, worrying if I'm late. Somewhere they can't have Christmas without me."

"Is this guy worth giving up the theatre?"

"No one's worth giving up something you live for. I just don't know how much I live for that... marvelous imaginary world now. I've seen a lot of life, haven't I? I've had my wild twenties, my invigorated thirties. I could... settle down?"

"Huh."

"What are you going to do? About Alice?"

"Go on suffering. Waiting for her call. Reinventing the rules in my mind, of what a woman's entitled to—you know, trying to remember to forget everything this society taught me about what I'm allowed to hope for."

"Hope for," Chris mused.

"Yeah. Because I hope that she'll see
me
as home and move back in. Come on
home,
I'll say, and she'll go..." Blushing, Evan quickly said, "Fuck all that—what are
you
going to do?"

Chris sipped her tea as the history meter ticked away. We need to know what she does. Chris Predicts.

"Flip a coin?" says Chris.

"A
LL RIGHT, SHOW me," said Lois, putting on her horse trader's smile, which reads, I'm honest and I pay cash, but I drive a
tight
bargain.

"Got these flintlocks, now," said the guy.

"Hell, is this the Spirit of '76?"

"Heh, maybe just about."

"Well, those are some pieces. Estella, come and see."

"Tha's okay," says Estella, hanging back by the register. She doesn't care for this give-and-take with the customers. She wants only to add the prices and take the money. Fair enough.

"I like the style of that stuff," Lois tells the man. "Though who knows what's the market for these old—"

"They all say that. Drop in the store a week later—it's all sold."

"No kidding," says our Lois, unconvinced.

"Got these Glidden vases, fine things," the guy goes on, ladling out the art pottery, and now Lois is glad. "This'll put meat on the plate," she says.

"Heh, stuff'll jump right out of the store."

The store is Lois's antiques shop, where she has arrived after nearly two

decades of opening and closing two taverns, a restaurant, and even a sedate little dance hall in various parts of Hillsborough County, just north of New Hampshire's Massachusetts borderline. Nothing seemed to work; the gelid, unadventurous clientele depressed her and the authorities hemmed her in with ordinances.

"There's not much bohemia to draw on here," said Elaine at some point in all this. "You've always catered to the nonconformists, after all."

"I thought New England was the land of the individualist," Lois had gruffed.

"It is, but they're all individualist in exactly the same way. How about opening an antiques store?"

"What?"

"Think of the larks you'd have, exploring the countryside for ware. And at least you'd be running something—that's your forte. Being in charge, keeping the keys, lacing into the staff, telling off the customers..."

Lois grunted with pleasure.

"Besides," Elaine went on, captivated by the picture of her Lois doling out bud vases and quaint fans to tourists, "it's the ultimate completion of the lesbian experience—two grannies retiring to the outback, where one writes novels and the other sells antiques."